Take Me Back.
“I had all and then most of you, some and now none of you.
Take me back to the night we met.”
— Lord Huron, “The Night We Met”
I want to go back to the night we met.
Late on a Saturday, humid August wrapping us up. I think sometimes that your womb was the last time I felt really safe.
I weighed three pounds, one ounce back then. So tiny you could hold me and my two brothers all at once in your arms. You, who had carried us for so many months, finally got to hold us, and we finally got to be held. Our family was whole then, as Saturday faded and a brave Sunday morning rose before us.
I don’t remember it, of course.
I don’t remember a lot of things these days.
I don’t remember what your voice sounded like anymore.
It hasn’t been that long, has it?
Now I’m all grown up. Or I’m supposed to be anyway. Because when I can’t figure out how to do my laundry or bake cookies, I can’t call my mom.
A lot of people my age have the luxury of cluelessness. They say they don’t feel like adults yet.
I feel like all too much of one.
Take me back to the night we met.
Take me back to when I was sixteen, puzzling over why people ever wished to go back in time when there was so much ahead of us.
Take me back to when I believed you would get better one day.
Take me back to when your appendectomy was the most earth-shattering hospital encounter I’d ever had.
Take me back to when all these textbooks and classes felt important.
Take me back to when Christmas was magical, not mournful.
Take me back to when I was baffled over how people could become obsessed with a past that had evaporated long ago.
I always thought there was value in experiencing the world, but now that I’ve seen it, I know what it feels like to rather not know.
A few weeks ago, I found myself at a networking dinner. At a restaurant with the lights low, old white men in blazers all around me, their voices rumbling across tight table tops. I felt the business cards in my pocket and kept my eye on the big players — the ones I came there to talk to — but they were encircled already by up-and-comers twice my age and with a longer list of degrees.
At my table, we’re outsiders.
The waiter appeared and proffered a drink menu. The man across from me scanned it, ordered a glass of wine.
He handed it to me. “Do you want anything?”
“Oh no, thank you, I’m good.” I forced a smile and a chuckle. I didn’t tell him that I’m underage. I looked around the room and knew I was the only one under 21 there.
Take me back to when I used to get mistakenly offered kids’ menus instead of drink menus.
I’ve heard grief makes you look older. Maybe it’s true.
I feel older. I look in the mirror and for the first time see dark circles under my eyes, even when I get enough sleep. My muscles and bones ache and I have new sympathy for everyone who can’t get through a day without napping. I wear jewelry now, just to prove that I’m old enough for all this.
I’m not old enough for all this.
I didn’t say anything that night at dinner. As I go to leave, someone I don’t know stopped me and jokingly thanked me for lowering the average age. “Substantially,” he added.
I shouldn’t be allowed to lose a parent before I’m old enough to drink. I shouldn’t be allowed to teach people about grief before I can rent a car. I shouldn’t be allowed to pick out clothes for my mom to be buried in when I’m still used to calling her to ask whether my new shirts count as business casual.
I shouldn’t be allowed to go shopping for a casket before I have my own credit card.
I remember a friend telling me about how her grandparents had bought their tombstone already. “No,” she wanted to tell them, “you’re not allowed to leave.”
I didn’t know how to break it to her.
Just because it’s not allowed doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
I go home that night and take a hot shower. I remember when someone once told me that part of being a grown up is showering for yourself, without being told to.
In that case, I’ve been a grown up for a long time.
When I was about 12, my parents tried everything to convince me that I was too old to carry a teddy bear everywhere with me. I still do it.
How can I be an adult when I’m still not on first-name basis with most of them? Professors, doctors, priests, aunts and uncles — adulthood is still something separate from me, something that other people do.
But I can’t be a child anymore. Because children aren’t supposed to know that all the people they love can die with no warning. Children aren’t supposed to know that hospitals don’t save everyone. Children are supposed gaze in awe at ambulances and fire trucks, the whirring lights and loud horns, not have flashbacks when they see those lights race outside their window.
Take me back to when I was afraid of the dark.
Now, I live in the dark. It’s not all bad, but it’s all black. I wake up and it feels like midnight again, a never-ending blindness which tangles underneath my feet and rises in walls in front of me. I wake up and the world is dark, darker than I could ever have imagined.
I wish I could be a child again. But I know I can’t. Once you’ve seen how fragile the world is, I don’t think it can ever quite go back to being the safe stronghold it once was.
I see now in a way I’ve never seen.
You can’t take me back to my childhood.
Instead, cradle what’s here now. Cradle gently the fractured pieces of me as I struggle to figure out where they belong. Take care of me like a little child, and trust me like an adult.
Take my complexity alongside the simple truths.
You can’t take me back to when everything was OK. You can’t take me back to when life was lighter.
So just stay with me here, until I learn to see in the dark.
